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Tipping Point For Open Access CS Research?
First time accepted submitter trombonehero writes "Prominent Computer Science researchers from Google, Microsoft and UC Berkeley are starting to sign the 'Research Without Walls' pledge, promising to never be involved in peer review for a venue that does not make publications available to the public for free. Others have made similar pledges in isolation; could this be the start of something big?"
[C]ould this be the start of something big?
Call me when you get medical researchers to sign up for something like this. CS is a small backwater that the general public (and other fields, frankly) will not notice.
It's a good thing, but not necessarily earth-shattering. It would be nice to see articles out from behind the IEEE and ACM paywalls, though.
That is all.
This is big. There are a lot of parasitic journals today, that is, journals that take work the public paid for, and lock it behind paywalls. Parasitic journals typically use big-name free labor from to do the peer reviews. If the world removes from the parasites many good peer reviewers, as well as many good papers (through policies like the NIH Public Access policy), then they will have to change or fold. I don't have a problem with organizations paying for work to be done, and then charging for use of the result. For example, most fiction authors get at least some money for their labor (not a lot, but at least some). In contrast, parasitic journals typically take publicly-funded stuff away from the public; time to change. By the way, there are a number of journals and publications that have always done this, like ACSAC. If authors would simply ONLY submit their works to open access journals and publications, the parasites would disappear.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
And the one that matter for me (a researcher) is how I get funded. Basically I get funded when I can convince other people of how good I am. To estimate that, they look WHERE I am publishing my research; and most likely, they do not look at WHAT I am saying. The name of the conference or the journal is what matters most. What you are actually doing is not so important.
I know that suck. It makes me cry at night. But that is what it is. If I came not to publish in journal with no public open access, I won't be able to publish in journals that matter in my field. So I won't get funded.
I totally agree the public should be able to read what ever we write. But I can not give up my funding. (For the record: no funding, no food on my table.)
Moreover, that's basically a false issue. All journals and conference allow you to publish pre-print on your website. All my papers are on my website or in arxiv. So I am not even sure it matters so much.
Of course, complete open access for everybody would be better.
what the fuck are you talking about. "small backwater"? eat shit.
Easy tiger. If you cherish an academic discipline so much, one would imagine that you could bring your point across in a more articulated manner. I hardly believe an academic discipline needs (or appreciate) 3-grade retorts, specially if it is an academic discipline that started as a branch of Mathematics, and in which Mathematical Logic plays an important role.
He does have a point in that CS is a very small discipline in terms of its body of knowledge (in relation to other STEM fields). CS by itself is just short of 4 decades old, and the study of computability barely a century old. This opposite with the other engineering and science fields that have hundreds of years, on top of millenia of study and practice.
Don't confuse the pervasiveness of computing in modern life with the pervasiveness of Computer Science proper among the other STEM fields.
I do disagree with him, however, on his assessment that this is or might not be earth-shattering. For one, the fact that is occurring at all is earth shattering. And secondly, most earth-shattering events in science and academia do not start with a bang out of nothing (instead, they start from seed events and findings that gain momentum over time.)
Furthermore, even if CS is small fish when it comes to academic research, the institutions (both academic and private) that are pushing for this aren't small fish themselves. There is enough muscle there to bend arms.
Could you present some evidence for your analysis? You sound as if all the "ground breaking" research in CS during the early years originated out of thin air. This is ridiculous. Much of early ideas in CS are derivatives from established concepts in mathematics, physics and philosophy. Also, creating a new idea is not the same as proposing an useful idea. For example, parallel programming techniques have been around since the early years, but it took many years of small research steps to transform these initial ideas in useful, easy-to-use programming languages.
So, why not go for an online rating system where the "peers" can vote on good papers?
Because Digg and Reddit have taught me that often the top rated items are of poor quality, and that most really good submissions/comments don't get notably high in the rankings.
Ratings is a popularity metric, not a quality metric.
Beetle B.